Sensemaking and Time: Toward a Radical Processual Ontology

Sensemaking is ongoing. This emphasis on continuity resonates with Weick’s call to “stamp out nouns” and to view organizations not as fixed entities but as unfolding processes. In this way, sensemaking has significantly contributed to the development of process thinking in organization studies. Yet the precise nature of process in sensemaking remains vague and, at times, inconsistent. To recover its generative force, this chapter argues for a more radical processual ontology, drawing on the work of James, Bergson, Whitehead, and Mead. A processual understanding requires that we take time seriously—not as a neutral container of events but as pure duration: a continuous, heterogeneous flow of becoming. This rethinking of time is inseparable from sensemaking’s retrospective character. Retrospection presumes a cut in continuity, a selection from the stream of experience. But is human sensemaking necessarily a matter of such cuts, or can it also stretch toward more intuitive, affective, and embodied modes of perception? The reflections offered here converge on the possibility of rethinking sensemaking not only as a cognitive or interpretive act, but as a form of intuition—an attunement to the fluid, preconceptual rhythms of experience.